Playing part of a pol, without having to carry out accompanying responsibilities

Perhaps it’s only natural that people who can’t hold a position any longer (or are just tired of it) use their fame to try to get themselves a television gig.

Will we someday have to see Rahm … 

Being a “commentator” allows them to keep portraying themselves as some sort of expert on whatever it is they’re interested in – without having to carry out any of the actual responsibilities.

OR HAVING TO go through the hassles of continually getting themselves re-elected to office!

Think about it? We’re now forevermore going to see Luis Gutierrez as the outspoken critic of our national immigration policy, while Rahm Emanuel will portray himself for as long as he wishes as Chicago’s “mayor.”

No matter how much the thought of those two men in those positions stirs up levels of contempt and disgust, we’ll always now think of them as “congressman” and “mayor” no matter what it is they really do in life.

These thoughts popped into my head when, on Monday, Gutierrez felt compelled to release a statement saying he’s now a part of CNN. He’ll be someone they can put on the air to talk about immigration policy and the Puerto Rican population of our nation.

… and Luis speak out … 

IN SHORT, THE man who during his two-plus decades in Congress portrayed himself as “Mr. Puerto Rico” himself any time a related issue came up on Capitol Hill can now go about portraying himself as the ultimate expert.

Those of us who remember back even further when he was a City Council member bellowing about like a crowing rooster (giving him the nickname “El Gallito”) will find act old – if not downright repetitive.

Yet the rest of the nation is going to get his share of the act. Particularly the ideologues who often will find themselves on the receiving end of whatever admonishment Gutierrez feels to dish out at any given time.

It assures that even though Gutierrez ceased to be a Congressman last week, he’ll continue to be heard. Personally, I’m waiting for the moment Gutierrez successor Rep. Jesus Garcia, D-Ill., does something that Luis considers to be a screw-up.

… on our television sets?

I HAVE NO doubt the rhetoric will be ugly – in both English en Español.

Not that it will be any more pretty when Rahm Emanuel finally steps down as mayor come May. For the talk is that brother Ari, a professional talent agent in his own right, already is doing the groundwork for Rahm to become one of the ranks of professional commentators himself.

For as a former member of Congress and White House aide under both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, he has a certain amount of issues and policy background. Combined with his eight years as Chicago mayor, he may wind up trying to claim himself as the expert on all sorts of things.

Could Garcia be blasted by Luis and Rahm?

Maybe he can even develop a personality of sorts that would allow him to be declared an unofficial “mayor” of the nation – someone who can forevermore be thought of as having an expertise. Even on issues upon which he knows absolutely nothing.

THAT ACTUALLY WAS the niche Rudy Giuliani once held, as the symbolic “America’s mayor” – at least until he became associated publicly with fellow New Yorker Donald Trump and relegated himself to the niche of the crackpot’s protector.

Will Rahm replace Rudy as 'America's mayor?'

Is the nation ready for Rahm; to speak out at his own will on whatever he thinks interesting? Anybody who tries claiming Rahm doesn’t have Rudy’s stature is engaging in crackpot rhetoric of their own – both men served as mayors of their respective cities for eight years.

But every time they appear on television, we get reminded of their stints – and many of us may wind up thinking they’re still in office doing great things; instead of merely blathering about on various issues that they had little to actually do with.

Which almost has me wondering if the greater point of running for electoral office is to gain the years of experience so that, one day, one can claim the legitimacy so they can someday go on television and have people think they used to “be somebody.”

  -30-

Dueling thoughts on Blagojevich; how will they differ on Ill. Governor?

Call it one of the perks for people who enjoy the read of newspapers that compete with each other – we in Chicago now have rival thoughts for what should become of our state’s former governor who is half-way through serving a 14-year prison term.

Blagojevich, from back in the days when being governor was fun. Photo provided by state of Illinois

The fate of Rod Blagojevich, whose case has worked its way through the appeal process all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, is now in the hands of President Donald Trump – who implied earlier this week he’d be inclined to consider some form of clemency.

THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE – the newspaper that was so opposed to the concept of a “President Donald Trump” that they endorsed a Libertarian candidate for president – came out this week with an editorial stance saying (in essence) “Hell, No!”

They literally wrote in an editorial urging Trump to back off the issue, “We have…concluded that the sentence he earned not only is fair. It’s fair warning to other criminal pols in Illinois, the State of Corruption.”

Yet the Chicago Sun-Times, the newspaper that proclaims itself to be that of the workingman and was solidly behind Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential bid of 2016, came out with an editorial stance headlined, “Trump schemes aside, Blagojevich deserves shorter sentence.”

The newspaper that at one time called itself, “The Bright One” says that having Trump commute the Blagojevich sentence to time already served would essentially mean the one-time governor would have lost the past six-and-a-half years of his life to federal incarceration.

WHICH IT SAYS is fair in that it would mean Rod would have done about the same amount of prison time as former Gov. George Ryan got for his criminal convictions dating back to actions he committed as an Illinois secretary of state.

Each newspaper has managed to take an opposing stance on the same issue, which I’m sure is part of their efforts to differentiate themselves from each other – and from other newspapers in existence.

It’s part of what gives a publication its sense of personality, and what will be lost if those people all eager to dump the printed-on-paper word for ramblings published on the Internet (including this very weblog) wind up seeing their vision prevailing in the not-so-distant future.

And yes, it will stir up resentment among many. Since I don’t doubt there are people so unsympathetic to Rod Blagojevich that they want him to suffer – and don’t particularly care that the sentence he is now serving (scheduled for release sometime during 2024) might be a tad too long.

ALL I KNOW is that if the two remaining metro daily papers in Chicago can get this worked up over Blagojevich’s future, I’m anxious to see how they wind up weighing in on the upcoming gubernatorial elections coming Nov. 6.

Back during the primary, the Tribune was the paper that found its way to endorse Gov. Bruce Rauner in the Republican Party primary over Jeanne Ives, while picking Christopher Kennedy’s failed bid for governor over that of ultimate winner J.B. Pritzker.

Their editorials made it rather clear they didn’t think much of the idea of a “Governor Pritzker” and that they were buying into much of the line of logic that Rauner presents that he needs ideological allies to do what he wants (particularly on issues related to organized labor) if Illinois is to improve.

While the Sun-Times backed Pritzker’s primary bid in ways that made it clear they don’t have a problem with him being governor – particularly if it means that Rauner winds up out on his keister come Inauguration Day in January 2019.

HOW VOCIFEROUS WILL the editorial rhetoric become?

Will we have to make the editorial pages a “must-read” in coming months? Will we have to snicker at those people who insist on saying they “don’t read” editorials, because it shows they don’t know what they’re missing?

Will the biggest loss to our city’s local news scene on that future date when there are no more dueling newspapers be that we have a lone editorial voice pompously trying to tell us what to think?

Because by reading the editorials these days, it’s quite clear there’s only one thought overwhelmingly held by all of us – nobody (and I mean nobody) wants Rod Blagojevich back in any form of electoral office!

  -30-

Sinclair gives me gas, and not the useful kind like the old service stations

I’ll say it now, and I’ll say it loud – the concept of “liberal media” is a myth!

Many different faces all saying the same thing

If anything, we’re more likely to have a trivial media – over-anxious to feed us details about every stupid pseudo-celebrity and gory homicide, rather than report details about issues that the corporate execs who run many news organizations these days likely think are “boring!!!,” and also downright costly to cover.

Won't be Chicago's 'very own' much longer

SO WHEN I read this week of the reaction of Baltimore-based Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc., officials who said that all print news media are biased and that their collection of television stations are the only ones they trust to tell the “truth,” I couldn’t help but think that somebody is feeling a tad insecure about their status.

Or lack, thereof.

Although I suspect their lack of a corporate thick skin is going to result in many more diatribes by this entity – which is the one that is in the process of acquiring control of WGN-TV and the other television stations across the country that used to be known as Tribune Media.

Is broadcaster defaming oil company's name?

You’d think that Sinclair officials would be used to this. Although the company thus far has focused its properties on the South and in smaller media markets – the ABC affiliate in Springfield, Ill., is the only Sinclair-owned entity I’m aware of anywhere near Chicago.

WITHIN THE NEWS business, Sinclair has long had a reputation for the commentaries they put together – then expect ALL of their television stations to air unedited. I don’t doubt that for the Smith family that owns controlling interest in the company, their ability to get their ideologically conservative viewpoint out IS their primary reason for being in the broadcast news business.

And now that they want to buy up the old Tribune TV properties, they will have themselves in the New York, Chicago and Los Angeles markets – along with many other major cities across the country.

Its been a long while since Sinclair operated anywhere near Chicago

Their grasp over the nation will grow significantly (what’s the figure, 72 percent of the U.S. public will have the option to get their “news” from Sinclair-owned stations). Which has some people scared and hoping that the FCC is somehow capable of thwarting the deal.

But with the FCC a part of the federal government now under the control of President Donald Trump – who recently Tweeted us to say how much he approves of Sinclair’s spin of the news – I’d say it’s highly unlikely any federal regulators would do a darned thing to interfere.

PERSONALLY, I THINK the only people who complain about “liberal media” are the ones with such ideological hang-ups of their own that what they really want are “far right” programs to the exclusion of all others. It says more about their own leanings than anything that is wrong with what exists on television.

The idea that so much ideologue tripe is being spewed (and that there are those who think alternatives ought to be prohibited) is something that gives me gas.

And not of the type that is pumped into our automobiles at Sinclair Oil stations across the country – although not anywhere in the Chicago-area any longer (they only have three stations in Southern Illinois and four stations in Indiana – one of which is in Indianapolis.

Whenever I hear the Sinclair name, it has brought to my mind the green dinosaur that is part of the Sinclair logo.

BUT NOW, IT threatens to bring to my mind the nonsense being repeated everywhere – such as in that recent collection of commentaries aired on assorted television stations by many different broadcasters, but all containing the exact same wording regardless of where it was aired.

I’m sure it will be just a matter of time before someone on WGN (which for years has been “Chicago’s Very Own") will wind up having a Baltimore-prepared commentary for them to broadcast; informing us of how irresponsible and reckless Chicago is on whatever issue that Trump happens to have buzzing about in his pea-sized brain that particular day. As though we Chicagoans ought to feel shame at our opposition to this Age of Trump we’re now in. Rather than continuing our resistance.

Will broadcaster suffer a similar fate?

If we’re lucky, perhaps the Sinclair overbearing attitudes will have a similar effect as the end of the 1990’s-era children’s show “Dinosaurs.” In that show, Earl Sinclair (a dim-witted dinosaur nowhere near as lovable as Dino from “The Flintstones”) inadvertently caused the environmental calamity that brought on the Ice Age and made dinosaurs extinct.

Maybe enough dim-witted commentaries that go against the mood of the nation (Morning Consult’s latest poll has Trump with a 54 percent disapproval rating for March – and 60 percent in Illinois) is what will turn the viewing public against watching Sinclair-owned television properties or trusting anything they have to say,

  -30-

EXTRA: Donald Trump, (a.k.a., The National Goofball, according to Royko)

I’m not about to take credit for that label being affixed to our nation’s new president. Credit for that moniker ought to go to the man who came up with it.

That was Mike Royko, who back when he needed to come up with columns to satisfy his syndicate readers beyond the Chicago Tribune wrote commentary on the 1980s and early 90s antics of one Donald Trump.

BACK THEN, TRUMP wasn’t a political person or a television celebrity. He was a New York real estate developer who lived the Manhattan high life and flaunted his garish lifestyle – which made for good newspaper copy.

The New York Post, in particular, enjoyed having “The Donald” to write about. Even when Trump was engaging in philandering behavior that would make Bill Clinton look like a choir boy, Trump enjoyed the attention, which gave us that ultimate Trump headline “Best Sex I Ever Had” (as in the mistress telling her friends about Donald’s alleged ability in bed).

For the record, “The National Goofball” label came from a column Royko wrote about the public spats Trump had been having with the women who are now his ex-wives.

Although “The National Goofball” is general enough that we could easily resurrect the label and use it to describe just about any of Trump’s behavior during his presidency.

ALSO FOR WHAT it’s worth, a cursory read of old Royko columns (there really isn’t anyone else like him these days) produced these lines by Royko to describe Trump:

n  “Ruthless billionaire with an ego the size of a sperm whale.”

n  “I finally decided that he was totally loathsome when, in addition to his other flaws, he turned out to be a cheapo” (in reference to the divorce settlement provided to his first wife Ivana).

Then, there was the column in which Royko envisioned what a conversation would be like if he were to merely walk up to Trump, who naturally would be with one of his mistresses of the moment.

Wrote Daley book, what would he say about Trump

Royko “quoted” Trump as saying, “Since it is my duty as The Donald to share with the American public every detail of my private life, my every emotion, my every thought, as banal and tawdry as they might be.”

THIS IS A little taste of what we might be getting if we still had Royko on our commentary scene – instead of it being nearly 20 full years since he died just shy of his 65^th birthday.

Personally, I suspect Royko would have been appalled, although not so much at anything Trump did, but at the electorate.

For we did, after all, vote for “The National Goofball” to be our president despite his track record of several decades as not being a serious individual. Why should we be shocked, or appalled, at anything he has done, or will do, during the next four years?

  -30-

How free are we to say on social media how absurd we think we all are?

It seems that President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has made heavy use of a personal Twitter account to spread word of his thoughts (which I doubt consist of anything more than 140 characters at a time), is selective of who is permitted to read him.

Recent news reports tell of people who cannot read anything posted by the account of @realDonaldTrump because he has chosen to ban then.

THIS DOES NOT seem to be an uncommon notion. I have a Facebook friend who likes to use his account to post political missives (usually along the lines of how misunderstood Trump is) who recently declared that people can’t comment on his page unless they “friend” him and how he reserves the right to delete anything he considers irrelevant to his issues.

Personally, I think that amounts to people putting way too much time and effort into their social media accounts. Or perhaps they really believe they should be taken all that seriously. Although I also understand that my friend probably has many idiots who have nothing better to do than post obscenity-laced diatribes on his site telling him how wrong he is!

I have always had a rather loose attitude toward people responding to me when I write something – largely because I have always realized that people have the right to be wrong.

I feel pity for those who don’t realize the innate sensibilities of the stances I take when I write various commentaries. Either that, or I figure I already had my say on an issue by writing the initial commentary.

WHEN IT COMES to responses published on this site, the only things I delete are those from people who insist on using profanity. I can handle the fact that 100 percent of the populace does not agree with me. I just don’t need to contribute to the spread of obscene language.

Which means I kind of feel sorry for those people who feel a need to control the level of debate they are subjected to while taking actions that are meant to provoke a reaction. What’s the fun in writing thoughtful commentary if all you’re seeking is people who agree with you?

If anything, I’m curious to see what becomes of the Twitter missives sent out by Trump – which, by the way, was the focus of a Saturday Night Live sketch this past weekend – once he gets access to the presidential account.

As in the one now used by Barack Obama and his aides to send out messages to his supporters. Will knowing that his thoughts will now be archived for posterity cause Trump to tone down his level of nastiness?

OR IS HE going to resist using the official presidential Twitter account and try to use his own personal one; on the grounds that he wants more control over the process.

Which would be very similar to the line of logic that Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state in insisting on having a personal Internet server to handle the e-mail messages she sent instead of merely using the official federal government amenities.

Ironic if Trump wound insist on committing an act very similar in intent to the one that he repeatedly claimed during the campaign that she deserved incarceration for.

In my own case, I have Facebook (www.facebook.com/gregory.tejeda) and Twitter (@tejeda_gregory) accounts – although I don’t really do as much as many people do with either. I see them as serving a self-promotional purpose – usually to make people aware of the thoughts that are being published at this weblog. Which is why I let people say what they want – I’m amazed they bothered to post at all.

IN FACT, THE Twitter account has only been in existence for not quite two months, and I have fewer than 20 people “following” me. Largely because I see the medium as so limiting that it’s not worth much of my time.

Which makes me wonder about what kind of public official have we, the people, truly elected. A twit who Tweets? And one who thinks he can restrict with the whim of a couple of computer keystrokes who is allowed to read his thoughts. Most of which are insipid enough that I haven’t bothered to want to be among the “millions” of people who follow his account.

I’d like to think I have better things to do with my time and read him. I wish more people felt the same way, and not just about Trump.

“Social” media, by-and-large, is for use by people whose social skills are so lacking that I doubt we’d ever want to encounter them in person.

  -30-

Could Trump solve Chicago’s problems within a week? Only in his mind!

It seems that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s failed attempt to hold a campaign rally last spring at the University of Illinois at Chicago made a bigger impression on him than we would have envisioned.

 

Has Trump ever really been in Chi outside his tower?

But in true Trump fashion, the event has become a distorted twist of fantasy that makes no sense on just about any level.

FOR MEMORIES OF that time came up during television interviews on the national cable news channels as Trump and his allies tried to seriously twist the happenings of that Friday night into something it was not.

The reality was that the would-be rally Trump wanted to hold on the Near West Side campus wound up being cancelled because the unruly crowds of spectators got out of hand – although Chicago Police have since said they never advised Trump to cancel the event outright.

It was Trump himself who didn’t have the backbone to face off against people inclined to be critical of him. It is to be expected considering that most Trump rallies are programmed to devolve in the true faithful harassing, intimidating and even beating on the candidate’s critics.

Which is what made the comments by Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, during an interview with CNN all the more laughable.

HE TRIED TO describe that Chicago appearance as one in which Trump tried to speak out to African-American voters, only to be rebuffed by them.

As Lewandowski said, Trump, “went to the heart of Chicago to go and give a speech to the University of Chicago in a campus, which is predominantly African-America, to make that argument. And you know what happened? The campus was overrun, and it was not a safe environment.”

It seems to me that Trump, if he really believes this, didn’t have a clue what was going on – and not just because he wasn’t anywhere near the Hyde Park neighborhood that actually has the University of Chicago.

Or that the University of Illinois at Chicago is in a neighborhood bordering on upscale that has more white people living in it than any other type.

PERHAPS TRUMP THOUGHT he was at Chicago State University? Then again, probably all Chicago college campuses look alike to Trump because they’re not a part of Trump University.

The reality is that Trump wasn’t anywhere near the “ghetto” that he envisions all of Chicago is. Perhaps he has spent too much time watching reruns of “Good Times” and comedian Jimmie Walker’s humor-tinged vision of life at the old Cabrini-Green.

But if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, Trump himself had to open his mouth during a Fox News Channel interview, saying he had met with high-ranking Chicago Police Department officials who he says told him they could “stop much of this horror show that’s going on” if they were let loose to actually enforce the law.

As Trump then put it, the officer said, “I’d be able to stop it in one week.”

GEE, ONLY ONE week to resolve the problems confronting Chicago? It’s just too bad that the likely solution suggested by this mythical cop is use of more force that would actually enhance the real problem law enforcement has in dealing with people.

Plus, there’s also the fact that Chicago Police officials on Wednesday insisted that no department officials ever met with Trump. Which leads me to believe this may have been a lone cop who was present at the University of Illinois at Chicago that night who was just shooting his mouth off.

Similar to how Trump often engages in that phenomenon known as “diarrhea of the mouth.” Saying whatever thoughts come to mind without regard to whether they make any sense.

Which is why those people who get all worked up over the violence level of Chicago (personally, I remember the late 1980s when it was much worse) are living in the ultimate fantasyland if they think a vote for Trump means a thing!

  -30-

EXTRA: My regrets I can’t comprehend Arabic in the least

I’m usually pretty loose when it comes to public comments. I’ll let people say just about anything they want here, so long as they don’t delve into profanity.

 

FARR: Sad if he's the only Lebanese you're aware of

Yet I was forced Thursday to delete one person’s proposed comment they wanted to post on the end of the Trump’s Second Amendment people wisecrack totally in character commentary that was published here Aug. 11.

THE PROBLEM? THE response was written in Arabic. I have no clue what it was that was being said.

Which is most likely a short-coming on my part. Unlike some foreign languages that use similar alphabets that I can kind of comprehend, I was unable to even come close to translating what someone was trying to say.

Although from what I could tell from the portion of this weblog that actually tracks (in a general sense) the whereabouts of my readership, this response came from someone in Saudi Arabia. Someone tried posting it at about 2:20 a.m., Chicago-time (which is the only time zone that matters here)!

Knowing my luck, I deleted a comment of great political and social significance. Then again, it might have been just an attempt at spam; someone trying to use this site to sell their product or service!

JUST ONE OTHER thought. In deleting the comment, I remembered an old episode of M*A*S*H where actor Harry Morgan’s “Col. Potter” character tried reading a letter written by the mother of actor Jamie Farr’s “Cpl. Klinger’s” back in Toledo, Ohio. Written in Arabic (the character was supposedly Lebanese), Potter said, “It’s a pretty language.”

One that many of us ought to not be so arrogant and quick to dismiss in today’s global community.

  -30-

Internet scam appeals to those who want to be greedy, instead of stupid

It seems that somebody has spent way too much time watching Three Kings, that 1999 film about soldiers in the aftermath of the early 1990s Gulf War who stumbled across, and tried to keep for themselves, gold bars that belonged to/had been stolen by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.


That film had a soldier portrayed by actor George Clooney, with a platoon consisting of Mark Walberg, Ice Cube and Spike Jonze, seizing the gold in the days after the war, then trying to figure out a way to smuggle it out of the country.


I WAS REMINDED of that film earlier this week when I stumbled across an e-mail message I received that purported to be from a U.S. Army sergeant currently serving in the military efforts in Afghanistan.


This sergeant contends that while on patrol on Friday, she found three bags in a small hidden tunnel.


Inside the bags was $3.2 million in U.S. currency which may have been stashed away for future use by Taliban interests (although this sergeant chooses to spell it "Taleban").


Hence, this soldier doesn't seem compelled to do anything to let higher authorities know about this (claiming in the email that I am "the first person am disclosing this to"). Just as in Three Kings, where it was only by a fluke that the higher brass learned of the gold, and which some of which was inadvertently "lost" before it could be returned to the Kuwaiti royal family.


NOT THAT I'M gullible to believe there is a soldier out there with $3.2 million (or THREE MILLION TWO HUNDRED United States dollar) who's willing to cut me in for a piece of the action, IF I'm willing to provide some personal financial information about myself to help that "soldier" get the cash out of the country before she gets shipped off to a new province.


It's the oldest Internet scam known to mankind; appeal to someone's greed in thinking that they can get something that really isn't theirs -- then bleed them dry of what little they do have once you get that valued financial information.


My guess is that suckering a lot of people of little bits of cash each can add up to a significant financial score.


I usually don't feel sorry for people who get scammed in such a way -- because it usually is their own greed that makes them dumb enough to get suckered.


BUT SOMETHING ABOUT this particular scam caught my attention -- the fact that when I first saw the "line" about this e-mail, it came up as "Active USarmy." Some soldier's private e-mail account got hacked into, which makes that person the victim.


If not just for the hassle that soldier is going to have to go through in order to change their accounts to make them secure again.


Somebody seems to think that putting the military spin will appeal to all the people who want to go out of their way to "support our troops" no matter what the cause or action they're involved in. It has way too much potential to appeal to more gullible types in our society, in addition to the greedy who probably fantasize about spending the Taliban's cash on Internet pornography, or something equally insipid.


A part of me wants to send a response to this e-mail, one laced with expletives, so as to express my contempt for anybody who would stoop to such a level.


AND NO, I don't believe the Taliban is in any way involved with this effort. It's some wormy little twerp who has spent way too much time with his/her carcass parked behind a computer -- which ought to be tools to do significant things with, rather than an end in and of itself.


But I'd probably wind up singling out my e-mail account at this site for more potential hacker abuse. It's not worth it. I'm off to dig up my copy of "Three Kings," which is always good for a laugh, along with a mix of serious commentary about that two-decades-old military initiative.


So consider this commentary my response -- which not only serves to warn anybody else of the possibility of getting this message, but also allows me to say to whomever came up with this message the following of my own.


Drop dead!!!


  -30-

Free speech is a terrible thing to waste

I suppose I’m supposed to be up in arms and united behind a lawsuit filed by a Peoria man whose attempt at political parody managed to tick off the local mayor to the point where he sicc’ed his police department on the guy.

Yet there’s just something about this whole affair about a man who created an account on Twitter that purported to be the personal thoughts and expression thereof of Peoria Mayor Jim Ardis that would make me feel absurd to be in support of it.

FOR IT SEEMS that rather than offering any serious criticism of the policies of Ardis, or any attempt at humor related to those, this account usually portrayed the mayor as a drug-using buffoon who said things that were not so much outrageous, but stupid.

To my mindset, the account @peoriamayor was solely about defamation of character, and could have been the subject of a lawsuit by Hizzoner against Jon Daniel.

Instead, Ardis seems to think he is King Louis XVI (or at least Mel Brooks’ interpretation of him in “History of the World, Part I). “It’s good to be the mayor,” it would seem went through Ardis’ mind.

Because the end result was that municipal officials investigated and used subpoena power to force officials to disclose who was the source behind @peoriamayor.

THEN, THE POLICE went in. A raid, that wound up getting national attention a few months ago for its comical nature. The house was trashed. Police really didn’t find anything related to the Twitter account.

Daniel wasn’t even home at the time. He told the Chicago Tribune that he eventually went to the Police Department in Peoria, admitted the Twitter account was his, but wound up being charged with nothing.

After all, it’s not a crime to write nonsense and gibberish. I’m sure some clowns out there would argue I do it here every day.

The only person who wound up getting arrested from this police effort to be the mayor’s thugs was a Daniel friend who happened to be at the house at the time. And he only got arrested because police found marijuana in his possession.

PEORIA POLICE GO through all this trouble to investigate dissent and all they get out of it is a cheap drug bust!

Yes, Peoria city officials in this case are worthy of some embarrassment. And the lawsuit they’re now facing from Daniel may well be justified.

Yet that doesn’t mean I’m all that enthused about having to take up his cause and claim he’s some great defender of free speech – even though it seems that he regards himself as such.

When the gag that keeps getting repeated over-and-over in news accounts is the line from the Twitter account that had the Ardis character saying he was going to snort lines of cocaine while atop the Peoria Civic Center, it makes me wonder about the overall level of the site.

FART JOKES AND doody (or do you call it poo?) get old after one surpasses the age of six. Was this a site for people who mentally and emotionally can’t get over that hump? Freedom of speech really is just like the United Negro College Fund and the mind. It’s a terrible thing to waste!

For all the rhetoric we’re getting about how Daniel and his efforts were part of a great effort toward freedom of expression, I wonder about a site that tried to deceive people to think they were hearing from the actual mayor. I’d hope anyone with intelligence realized it wasn’t. But you never know with some individuals.

One final point – the ACLU attorneys who are representing Daniel in this case are comparing him to Thomas Nast and Jon Stewart and claiming that @peoriamayor was just another step in the great history of political parody.

Nast is long gone, and you can’t libel the dead. But if I were in Stewart’s position and had someone like this comparing this trivial work to that of The Daily Show, I’d give serious thought to filing a lawsuit claiming defamation of character!

  -30-

Is Sun-Times censoring its readership? Or just weeding out the nit-wits?

The Chicago Sun-Times let it be known this weekend that they’re going to follow a trend a lot of newspapers have undertaken when it comes to their websites – you won’t be able to post anonymous comments any more at the end of stories published at suntimes.com.

Getting w/ the program on anonymous commentary

The newspaper says that the comments meant to give readers a chance to express their views instantly have become a, “morass of negativity, racism, hate speech and general trollish behaviors” that do no good.

NOT THAT PEOPLE won’t be able to let their views be known about the stories the Sun-Times chooses to publish.

Because like many other publications – including the Chicago Tribune – already do, their sites are connected to Facebook in ways that make it very easy for people to post links to the newspaper’s stories on their Facebook pages.

Then, people can easily post their responses on those pages, while also saying whether they “like” the story in question – which in no way means they actually approve of what was reported.

In fact, the Sun-Times let it be known that’s exactly what people can still do – connect to the newspaper’s content on Facebook and Twitter.

SO THE FACT that the nasty comments will no longer be directly attached to the Sun-Times stories themselves won’t stop them from being made. Plus, there will always be the possibility of someone else using a different website to attack the newspaper in some form.

I know that firsthand, because I do some work for one of the suburban-based daily newspapers – the Times of Northwest Indiana – which actually made the same move more than a year ago that the Sun-Times is undertaking now.

In fact, reading the Sun-Times’ statement about the elimination of Internet comments, I was struck by the similarity. The Sun-Times says its change is temporary, while a new method of permitting commentary to editorial content is devised.

That’s the same thing the Times said it would do, and has not done yet. Although it’s always possible that I’m the last to know of an impending change.

ALTHOUGH THE REAL point is that I don’t think the Times lost much of anything when it did away with the strings of comments that would accompany many stories – with it turning out that there were a few people who seemed to feel the need to make a hostile comment about everything.

And many of those comments often had nothing to do with the actual story itself, but were rather about personalities and someone’s need to take a pot shot at someone else.

Anonymously, of course!

Personally, I feel sorry for such people that they seem to have so little in their lives that they ranted more than a year ago that the Times was censoring their views, just as they’re now complaining that the Sun-Times is engaging in CENSORSHIP!!!!

WHICH IS NONSENSE. It is censorship if they create their own site and write hostile comments, and someone tries to shut them down. That is un-American, and I would defend them, no matter how stupid and trivial their comments actually were on their own sites.

This is a case of going onto someone else’s site, and trying to tell them what they MUST publish. If anything, I consider those anonymous commenters to be more akin to censors than anyone else.

But I’m not going to get too worked up over them. They’re going to find other places to go to make their hostile, mean-spirited and petty comments.

While the bulk of us will feel compelled to ignore them because, after all, we have lives!

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Yes, I permit commentary here. I’m also pretty loose about what I permit. Stay away from the profanity, and I’ll permit just about anything – no matter how ridiculous it makes you seem for thinking that way.

Would we in Illinois regard the meme-d pepper-spray cop as the victim?

It’s the Chicagoan in me that caused a certain reaction to a CNN report I saw Sunday morning – one about how people are taking the image of  a police officer using pepper spray on students at a University of California campus and spreading it all across the Internet.

Who thinks cop is the victim? Image provided by Smosh.com



How many people here believe that the police officer (since identified as Lt. John Pike) is the victim in all of this, and that the people who are creating such images are somehow doing him wrong?

BECAUSE THAT CERTAINLY is the attitude that is spawned by Illinois law. I’m referring to the law that says that people who take video of police officers in action without their advance knowledge and consent are committing a crime.

If this had happened in Illinois, I’m fairly sure that someone would want to believe that the person who took the original images that are now being doctored-up into everything from a police officer spraying Bambi to Jesus Christ himself at the Last Supper would be worthy of prosecution.

Personally, I have always thought the Illinois law against such images was some sort of gross overreaction by conservative ideologues who don’t want anything done by their police to be used against him.

Even, and perhaps in particular, images of a police lieutenant using pepper spray to knock the sense out of Occupy Wall Street-type protesters who were peacefully sitting.

MY REACTION TO the Sunday morning news report was to wonder how quickly the state’s attorney’s office in Cook County would have sought to prosecute somebody for taking the image – had it involved the Chicago versions of the “Occupy” protesters and had it occurred in our fair city?

Which to me is such a gross over-reaction. Yet it is in character with the way that similar cases have been handled by police in Chicago. And I’m wondering how many people will want to believe that this is somehow disrespectful toward law enforcement personnel in general.

I know that some people are going to claim that this type of commentary is, in and of itself, somehow disrespectful or anti-law enforcement. Even though I do not believe it to be.

It is just that I have always thought that law enforcement personnel of all types should be held to a higher standard than the masses of our society. We do, after all, give these people considerable power to make judgment calls in cases that can result in the arrest and detention of individuals.

IF ANYTHING, A part of me wishes that it were possible for every single moment of a police officer’s on-duty activity to be video-taped. Perhaps if police realized that we were watching and that their professional conduct would be assessed in a blow-by-blow nature, there would be fewer incidents of official misconduct.

Actually, such an attitude could go to the benefit of the police, since if we could see them in action we might well gain respect for those incidents where they manage to show professional restraint in the handling of an individual whose own conduct crosses the line into “despicable.”

It also would serve as further evidence in their own cases – since I have seen in court proceedings how much credibility video gets from people where they can see what, and how, something actually happened.

But for that credibility to be maintained, we really can’t have a situation where police control the cameras and can keep us from seeing the screw-ups that occur all too often.

SO WHAT DO I think of the CNN report that was one of the first images I woke up to on Sunday morning?

I thought it was a bit trivial – and little more than an excuse to put on the air some image of Spongebob Squarepants getting blasted in the face with pepper spray.

But sometimes, it is the trivial details that, when put together, can illustrate a larger point of some seriousness. And the idea that our laws somehow would elevate triviality to criminal status makes me wonder how long it will be until the people put pressure on such laws to change.

Because the current law on such videotaping (particularly at a time when our society has become one where real people have less and less privacy) is one that only the 1 percent of society could truly support because they think it will be unleashed on the other 99 percent of us.

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Here’s hoping people don’t read more into Pulitzer prizes than they’re worth

First, let me state my congratulations to the three reporter-type people for the Chicago Sun-Times who took that newspaper’s first Pulitzer Prize in 22 years.

Their work documenting the details of a particularly violent weekend in Chicago (some 40 people shot, but none of the cases turning into a conviction in criminal court) offers up an understanding of a segment of our city that too many of us try to pretend doesn’t exist at all.

SO FOR THE fact that the Sun-Times will get professional credit for helping us to better understand our city, they deserve some credit. I only hope that people don’t take their Pulitzer for “Local News Reporting” doesn’t go to their heads.

Because I could see how some people would want to claim that this is evidence that the Sun-Times has managed to maintain a high quality despite all their budget cuts – as though all the resources (which even in their old days were few) of the past were somehow just wasted money.

The Sun-Times is a scrawny newspaper compared to the past that often fills its pages with copy taken from the suburban newspapers that their parent company also owns. Even many of those publications are mere shells of what they were a couple of decades ago (back when I graduated from college and began earning a living as a reporter-type person).

I look at the fact that three reporters for the Sun-Times can now claim to be Pulitzer Prize winners (while the Chicago Tribune got nothing this year, although there’s an odd story there too) as coming about despite the economic nonsense that has taken place at their newspaper – and at many other publications.

AND IT IS a half-way decent report worth reading even now, nearly a year after it was originally published.

The Tribune has endured just as many problems as the Sun-Times, although they have had their bankruptcy travails reported on at a national level.

So I can’t help but think that the Sun-Times Pulitzer prize somehow smarts at Tribune Tower – combined with the fact that the Los Angeles Times managed to take two Pulitzer prizes (including the one for public service reporting that is considered to be the most prominent).

The Tribune managed to get themselves named as a finalist for breaking news reporting, along with the Tennessean of Nashville and the Miami Herald (combined with its el Nuevo Herald Spanish language edition). But the bigwigs assembled by Columbia University to select the awards decided to pick no winner in that category.

SO WE’LL NEVER know if the Tribune’s accounts of the deaths of two Chicago firefighters who were killed while searching for squatters in an abandoned burning building were somehow worthy, or if the Haiti earthquake coverage coming from the Miami newspapers was somehow superior.

It will be one of those points debated by shrinking numbers of reporter-types over drinks for years to come.

Which is why the Tribune, not wanting to give the Sun-Times too much glory, chose the tactic of all newspapers that want to appear to be serious but didn’t win anything of their own to brag about.

The Tribune put together a story on Monday telling us of the Pulitzer prizes for various categories in the arts – and found that some of them were won by people with ties to Chicago.

SUCH AS THE prize for drama won by Bruce Norris. He’s a Northwestern University graduate and he has ties to the Steppenwolf Theatre. In fact, his Pulitzer-winning play “Clybourne Park,” is set in Chicago – although he chose to have it staged in New York and London before it will finally come to the Steppenwolf later this year.

The Tribune even informed us about how the Pulitzer winner for fiction was won by Chicago-born author Jennifer Egan.

In some ways, such coverage might be more honest and in line with what readers might care about. Letting us know about the winners of a top prize in the arts can be informative, while too much of Pulitzer Prize coverage evolves into a mess of self-congratulatory tripe.

Of course, that fact won’t stop me from my running joke whenever I write a particularly dreadful or convoluted piece of copy (telling whichever editor is relevant that I expect to get my Pulitzer for this piece).

WHO KNOWS? MAYBE there will be the day when the Pulitzer prizes will expand themselves to the point where various publications on the Internet will be in the running (rather than the limited categories that exist now). Maybe someday I’ll write a series of commentaries on this weblog that can qualify for the Pulitzer Prize either for “commentary” or “criticism.”

Then, maybe, I’ll be the one engaging in self-indulgent tripe about the prize, while others try to downplay it. At the very least, it would look good hanging on the wall next to my "Lisagor" award.

Ah, who’s kidding whom? Hinting that I’m going to win the Pulitzer someday makes me sound like those loons who seriously think the Chicago Cubs are going to win the pennant anytime soon.

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